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Mozilla Demanding Firefox Display EULA In Ubuntu

Posted by kdawson on from the branding-vs.-freedom dept.

TRS-80 writes "Users of the upcoming Ubuntu release, Intrepid Ibex, are being confronted with an EULA the first time they launch Firefox. Mark Shuttleworth says 'Mozilla Corp asked that this be added in order for us to continue to call the browser Firefox... I would not consider an EULA as a best practice. It's unfortunate that Mozilla feels this is absolutely necessary' and notes there's an unbranded 'abrowser' package available. Many of the comments say Ubuntu should ditch Firefox as this makes it clear it's not Free Software, hence unsuitable for Ubuntu main, and just ship Iceweasel or Epiphany, the GNOME browser." A few comments take Canonical to task for agreeing to Mozilla's demand to display an EULA without consulting the community.

3 of 785 comments (clear)

  1. EULA is quite important by Zurtex · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Firefox EULA outlines some quite important issues, not least of which is that it doesn't ship with a warranty. But what might be quite concerning to some, and is made clearish in the EULA, is that Firefox by default sends data to whatever 3rd party (Google) runs their anti-phishing. It's all to do with storing partial hashes rather than website addresses on the computer and in theory the 3rd party can't do anything useful with it and are legally required to not keep it. But some people still might find this quite concerning. More information on how Mozilla tries to make the data sent useless here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=419117

  2. EULA Contents: by nog_lorp · · Score: 5, Informative

    EULA: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/firefox-en.html

    Summary:
    Preamble - notice that the source is available and this license does not apply to the source.
    1. License Grant - This license gives you the right to use the executable provided by Mozilla Corp.
    2. Termination - if you breach this license, S1 is voided.
    3. Proprietary Rights - again, the source code is not proprietary. The branding logos are, you don't have the right to modify them.
    4. Disclaimer of Warranty
    5. Limitation of Liability
    6. Export Controls - you must comply with teh law.
    7. US Govt End Users - 2 sentences of legal references related to employees of the US Govt using Firefox.
    8. Misc, nothing interesting at all. This agreement constitutes the agreement...

    Sounds like Mozilla Corp doing the bare minimum to cover their asses, in a responsible fashion, without actually affecting end users at all.

  3. Re:Fair enough by m50d · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's not the way it happened. It wasn't the Mozilla contact, it was debian's own people, pointing out that their deal with mozilla was against debian principles - debian does not allow itself to accept licenses which are specific to debian, believing this could lead to it distributing non-free stuff. (After all, that agreement meant that a user couldn't take debian, call it something else, and distribute it as a new distro, because they wouldn't have that agreement for the mozilla trademarks).

    --
    I am trolling